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Welcome back to No So Massively, where every Monday we round up the highlights from the past week in the world of MOBAs, roguelikes, MMOTCGs, and other games that aren't quite MMOs.

Publisher Bohemia Interactive has revealed that DayZ, the cult-hit, open-world zombie survival game, has attracted more than three million sales since its debut on Steam's Early Access platform.

DayZ arrives at this milestone only a year after reaching Early Access. Despite pragmatic warnings from DayZ creator Dean "Rocket" Hall that the Early Access version of DayZ is incomplete, the game was an immediate hit, selling over a million copies in its first month, owing largely to the cult following it attracted in its original incarnation: a modification for Bohemia's ArmA 2 first-person military sim.

"We would like to say thank you to every single one of the three million players, that have joined us on the journey of making DayZ," writes project lead David Durcak. "You all have helped make DayZ the best open world, zombie survival game. This is an amazing achievement, and we are really looking forward to start sharing with you all of our game design improvements, anti-hack solutions and other optimizations we have been working on for a majority of the last year."

DayZ has been on Steam early access for over a year now, and what does the post-apocalyptic zombie sandbox have to show for it? Well, over 3 million customers, for starters.

A new Bohemia Interactive press release touts the 24 updates the game has seen since its "launch," and it also mentions ongoing improvements including a core engine rewrite begun in 2014. The new engine is called Enfusion, and it includes renderer upgrades and corresponding performance upticks as well as "vastly improved" particle effect aesthetics.

"That said, The War Z was a terrible choice of name, as it naturally invited comparisons between our game and DayZ," Titov admitted. "We made a big mistake in not listening to the vocal minority of our community who thought the name was terrible [...] Beyond not listening to the community, we were also very arrogant in our public communications. We should have taken more care to communicate how and why this was not a DayZ clone, citing specific differences in both design and conception. Instead of saying to ourselves 'Oh well, haters gonna hate!' we should have tried to understand where the hate was coming from and address it."

Another key mistake that Titov and his team made was engaging in an "arms race" to get The War Z to Steam before DayZ, which resulted in its being yanked from that platform due to misrepresentation of the existing game features. Even with these missteps, Titov said that Infestation sold 2.8 million copies, and of those, over half logged at least 50 hours of playing time apiece.

SMITE's world championships closed with half of a $2.6 million prize pool -- the third largest in e-sports history -- awarded to winners Cognitive Prime. SMITE also revealed character Hou Yi and opened Xbox One beta signups.

Elite: Dangerous is expanding both its team and its feature set, and it reversed its decision on how to handle the billionaire players created by last week's bug. Elite: Dangerous players also made headlines with their goal to chart out the whole galaxy for science.

DayZ creator Dean Hall tweeted his appreciation for a new fan film based on his popular zombie-flavored open world title earlier today. And why not? The flick is a believably bleak meditation on the game's dog-eat-dog post-apocalypse, even though it doesn't feature a single zombie.

Publisher Sony Online Entertainment has announced that its upcoming, open-world zombie apocalypse MMO H1Z1 will debut on Steam's Early Access service on January 15.

Normally this is where we'd warn you that Early Access games are, by definition, not complete and anyone purchasing access to an Early Access release should be aware that they're likely to encounter technical problems. However, SOE president John Smedley already did that, yesterday on Reddit. "What you'll be playing January 15th is a really fun game, but it's early," Smedley wrote. "It's everything Early Access should be - a fun and compelling game that isn't finished. Our goal is to have you help us finish it and have it be a game we can build a large community in over time."

If you're wondering how H1Z1 will stack up against the reigning king of the online zombie apocalypse subgenre DayZ, Smedley addresses that, too. "Is H1Z1 going to be better than DayZ [at launch]? No it won't," he admits. "We'll get asked that question a lot and I wanted to be up front about it. We're not as feature rich and they have a lot of really cool stuff we just don't have yet. That being said, we're also a different game. We're an MMO and our goals are to create a large scale world that gives you the incredible feeling of being a survivor in a zombie apocalypse."

SOE'sH1Z1 zombie sandbox is coming to Steam early access on January 15th. CEO John Smedley posted the news to Reddit a few moments ago, and he was quite specific about who should purchase the title in its current form.

"Is it going to be a finished game? Absolutely not. If that's what you're expecting, DO NOT BUY EARLY ACCESS," he wrote. "The goal here is to let you in early and help us mold it into a game you want to be a part of for quite a long time." Smedley went on to mention the entry-level price point ($19.99) and he also addressed comparisons between H1Z1 and Day Z.

"Is H1Z1 going to be better than Day Z day one? No it won't. We'll get asked that question a lot and I wanted to be up front about it," Smedley explained. "We're not as feature-rich and they have a lot of really cool stuff we just don't have yet. That being said, we're also a different game. We're an MMO and our goals are to create a large scale world that gives you the incredible feeling of being a survivor in a zombie apocalypse."

You can now play DayZ for free using a web browser ... kind of. Mini DayZ, a fan-made tribute to Bohemia Interactive's zombie apocalypse survival game, has been posted to the publisher's website and is now free to play via Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Opera. It's missing a few features - namely 3D graphics and multiplayer - but if you ever wondered to yourself, 'What if we gave DayZ a top-down camera and retro graphics," now is your chance to find out.

Mini DayZ is the work of CannedBits, a Russian player of Dean "Rocket" Hall's DayZ (which, in case you need a history primer, is a standalone game that began life as a mod for Arma 2 and arguably boosted the multiplayer survival genre into prominence). In posting the news about the game's availability via Bohemia to Reddit, CannedBits even caught the attention of Hall himself:

"I have to say, I absolutely love Mini DayZ," Hall wrote. "I think it's awesome, amazing, addictive, and brings something really new to the experience. I'm so glad you've been able to make it even better! Ignore the haters, the vast majority of people think it's fantastic and I am one of those people."

DayZ is a title in early access. That means that buying the game now will give you access to the full game when it goes live as well as the development versions along the way. Producer Brian Hicks recently took to the game's official forums to respond to player feedback by stating this rather bluntly: "You are not playing DayZ. You are playing development builds."

Hicks went on to explain that the game's current development pace is entirely normal for a large project, with the main difference being that most of these early builds are not seen by the public at large. Players who are displeased by the earlier builds are encouraged to step back and check in again when release is closer, as the later beta versions or the release client will be far closer to the finished experience. Whether or not you've been enjoying the game, it's a useful look at the development process and what it can mean to be playing on early access.

I can't be the only one who's wondered whether legit modders and underworld emulator coders are abandoning their craft in favor of more legal ventures, however. There might be more sunsetted MMOs, moddable UIs, and calls for "classic" game versions than ever, but the rise of low-risk crowdfunding, easy Steam greenlighting, and modular multiplayer titles that encourage customization makes me suspect that people who once modded shady MMO emulators or built interfaces for the masses are being lured away to work on something more legitimate or profitable or resume-worthy.

What do you think? Are emulators and modding going out of fashion? (Please don't link to anything illegal!)

As a narrative subject, zombies have become a bit cliche -- but there's still one game keeping the genre undead: Day Z. The multiplayer survival game started out as a mod for ARMA II, drawing in players by mixing hordes of zombies with the threat of other players, their lies and the general risk of the human element. It's a game that can give you trust issues, and now it's coming to the PlayStation 4.

The days of DayZ as we knew it are over; all hail the upcoming changes to everyone's favorite gankfest featuring the occasional zombie!

In an interview this week, DayZ creator Dean Hall outlined six improvements that the team is working on for the standalone version of the game. Right out of the gate is the decision to add an option to toggle DirectX 11 to make everything look a lot better. "Implementing DirectX 10 or 11 will have a dramatic, instant visual difference and quite a significant performance difference," Hall said.

Other changes include new 64-bit server architecture, better hunting mechanics, improved controls, a reworked loot system, and an early game experience fashioned specifically for new players.

Games like DayZ and Rust have become a whole genre unto themselves: open-world survival sandboxes that quickly turn into simulations of human cruelty. But why is that, exactly? Why do people in a sandbox devote so much of their energy to tearing one another down with such vigor? A recent article on Wired asks exactly that question, exploring these open-world games and why they tend to provoke such abject cruelty in their participants.

The piece comes to no hard and fast conclusions, speaking both from personal experiences and from interviews with other players. One player speculates that the core of it is that these games give you nothing but tools, so players invent their own fun by using other players as content. Another possible explanation is the very nature of catharsis, envisioning dark behaviors whilst knowing that you would never carry them out in the real world. Take a look at the full article if you'd like a deeper look at why players spend so much time in games where anything goes by clubbing others with rocks.

Poor zombies. All they want to do is eat a little brains and earn your respect, just like anyone else, but that's hard to do when they're walking into walls and clipping badly into a dumpster. Fortunately for our undead brothers and sisters, the devs on DayZ have figured out a good solution to problematic pathfinding.

"Our problem was not unique, but our situation was: our world is very big yet it requires the same precision as a small one," the devs wrote in a blog post. "The team devoted to solving this decided to use navigation meshes. The serious problem it presented, though, was how to generate these meshes. With nearly two million objects on the map, doing it by hand would not be an option. So a method was devised to split the world up into grids, and then raycast at a precise interval and generate chunks of navmesh."

The result? Zombies that can figure out how to cross a street and go into a building without embarassing themselves. The team also talked about some of the livestock it's creating for the game, including carp to be fished out of ponds by survivors.

"We have recently detected an attack on some of our servers, the precise nature and scope of this attack is currently being extensively investigated. There were no user data on any of the servers. Current development goals and schedules for our games will not be affected by this attack. More information will follow as our investigation continues," the firm explained.

Initial reports claimed that DayZ's source code was stolen, which could lead to all manner of future exploits in the post-apocalyptic zombie survival sandbox. Bohemia has neither confirmed nor denied the source code rumor.

It's generally expected that within the confines of the game, DayZplayers will be jerks whenever possible. However, such attitudes aren't limited to online: Developer Bohemia Interactive is currently investigating an attack on their servers, as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun. While a Reddit report of the hack claims that the entire DayZ source code was stolen, Bohemia only told RPS that no user data was affected.

"We have recently detected an attack on some of our servers," Bohemia told RPS. "The precise nature and scope of this attack is currently being extensively investigated. There were no user data on any of the servers. Current development goals and schedules for our games will not be affected by this attack. More information will follow as our investigation continues."

The news, much like a zombie outbreak, comes at with unfortunate timing: DayZpassed 2 million in sales less than two weeks ago. No good deed goes unpunished, it seems.

I'm naked and alone again, but that's OK. After having to level up in other games a million times, deal with boring tutorials, repeatedly turn in quests that add no value to my play time, and then watch as my guild slowly bleeds members to the next MMO asking us to repeat the whole ordeal, "naked and alone" is actually nice. Well, maybe just the naked part.

And that, my friends, is the horror-survival/post-apocalypse genre. I love MMOs, but recent themeparks and building games have left me wanting something a bit more dangerous but still not a pointless murderfest. For the most part, these games are less about levels and quests and more about finding items to make sure you don't die. Hunger meters, diseases, and limited supplies in a world filled with enemies who loot you certainly feels like a good throwback to classic RPGs mixed with the multiplayer I've been craving since Asheron's Callfirst hooked me on MMORPGs.

But community-wise, these games have seemed more like lobby shooters than MMOs, which for a long time made me hesitate to try them. If you've been finding yourself in the same situation, hopefully my little plunge into this bloody genre will give you some ideas of what to expect.
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alphaasherons-callbetasdarkfalldayzdayz-moddayz-standalonefeaturedfirst impressionsfull-loot-pvph1z1john-smedleynetheropen-pvpopinionpost-apocpost-apocalypsepost-apocalypticpvprustsandboxsoesony-online-entertainmentsurvival-horrorvirtual worldszombiesThu, 08 May 2014 16:00:00 -0400319|20872302